A soft, whirring computer is sweet music for Jim Sukup, college basketball's guru of quality wins and strength of schedule, the man who broke the code for the Ratings Percentage Index.

Headquartered in the basketball heartland of Indiana, Sukup has a degree in geology and a Ph.D. in bracketology.

For 11 years now, Sukup has been translating the RPI - the arcane formula that defines one of the key elements of which teams go to the NCAA tournament and which teams do not.

He has made the RPI mainstream, shining a light on the secret that is protected so zealously by the NCAA.

Sukup begins by applying values to team performance - 25 percent for winning percentage, 50 percent for schedule strength and 25 percent for opponent's schedule strength - and then goes from there.

"It's more complicated than that," Sukup said. "But that's a start."

Oh, that is not the real RPI, according to the NCAA. It is, however, as close as anyone has come, and it's the one available each week - the one to which schools and conferences and maybe even selection committee members pay attention in the course of the season.

The selection committee will come out of a weekend's worth of meetings on Sunday, the pizzas, peanuts and pretzels all consumed, the grid set for 65 teams. Thirty-one go to conference champions. The remaining 34 are at-large choices, discretionary picks that complicate the task.

"Getting the brackets and the seedings right is important to create a fair tournament," said Mike Tranghese, commissioner of the Big East Conference and former chairman of the selection committee. "The selection process for the most part is done by the end of Saturday. You can't be held hostage by the games on Sunday. You've got to be prepared and you've got to move forward. You can't stop and wait or you'd never get it done."

There is a nine-page explanation issued by the NCAA, intended to detail how the brackets are established. They get around to RPI on the last page, perhaps to play down its effect on the tournament.

Now all they have to do is convince the teams.

Lee Fowler, athletic director at North Carolina State and first-year chairman of the selection committee, says Sukup's RPI and the one the NCAA uses differ - one top-secret, the other very public.

Fowler knows which one everybody is looking at.

"As an athletic director, it gives you a barometer of where your basketball team stands in relation to the rest of Division I," he said. "When I was at Middle Tennessee State, we went from 110 to 280, so we knew where we stood."

Or rather, sat.

And even though the committee is weighing all manner of other things, Fowler knows how prominent the RPI has become.

"It's only one factor but it's one of the few people can actually see on paper, so that makes it more important," he said. "A lot of time, after the process is over, we may catch ourselves looking at the RPI."

Tranghese said he used the RPI as a tool. "I don't think it gets you in the tournament or keeps you out on its own," he said. "It's not a stand-alone. If a team I thought was not good had a low RPI, I wanted to know why. When a team with a 20-5 record had a high RPI, I wanted to know why. I used it as a backup measuring barometer."

Since Sukup's version of the RPI went public, he's had a parade of coaches calling him to plead their case.

"I get all kinds of stories," he said. "A coach will call and say his team ought to get credit for snapping the 36-game home court, conference winning streak of some other team. Coaches are lobbyists, always trying to put their team in the best possible light.

"They complain about schedule strength. It's hard to convince people sometimes that their schedule isn't as strong as they think. They'll call and say, `We played North Carolina.' Well, North Carolina this year is not the usual North Carolina. Normally, playing North Carolina would help in the strength of schedule. This year, it does not."

And the whirring computer knows it.

Sukup's RPI will continue through the tournament, although interest in it diminishes after Sunday, when the field has been seeded.

Then he will return to his offseason work:

Environmental geology.

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